It
was
April and balmy. Russell
opened the window to his home office and could barely remember what it
was like to feel cold, though it had just snowed a week earlier. He
looked at a picture of Lilah on the desk and thought about putting it in
a drawer. But he had a strange superstition about putting framed
pictures flat down — as if, by dint of some voodoo magic, the person in
the picture would suffer somehow. So he kept it there...and then went
back to rereading emails from Clare
— like the one sent in haste after she read his novel Face Blind (about
a young boy with prosopagnosia

In the year following Greg's divorce, he and his seven-year-old
daughter Helen had a computer game they played together before
bedtime. In the game you were a sphere that could move forwards,
backwards, to the right, or to the left, by pressing W, S, A, or D
on the keyboard. The space bar let you jump. While trying to collect
as many jewels as possible on a series of platforms, you had to
avoid trap-doors, moving walls, bumpers, exploding devices etc. One
mistake, and you soared downwards to expire in a lagoon far below.
Irritating music played all the time. As a representation of life
under capitalism, it was actually not

When it comes to altruism, the party line in evolutionary psychology
goes something like this: True altruism doesn’t really exist – it’s
not an evolvable quality of organisms given how natural selection
works her magic (which is by selecting features of organisms that
have the effects of replicating their own particular genes). The two
predominant kinds of altruism discussed by evolutionists both

Penis EnvySARAH STROUT

It was interesting to
note, given the plenary address of Gordon Gallup and his slide show
of giant penises (as they were projected to monumental proportions
on a 6-foot screen), that after the plenary, a number of men in the
audience were to be overheard blatantly proclaiming their
heterosexuality and indicators of fitness ("I run every day"!) to
the women around them, as if they were actually competing with a
potential competitor in the form of

In what sense might something as intrinsically human as the imagination
be biological? How could the products of the imagination — a novel, a
painting, a sonata, a theory
— be thought of as the result of biological
matter? After all, such artifacts are what culture is made of. So
why invoke biology? In this essay, I will argue that the content
of the imagination is of course determined more by culture than
biology. But the capacity to imagine owes more to biology than

"The Vinegar Tasters" is
an ancient Chinese tale about three wise men in a city in China, who, in
fact, represent the three major teachings there: Confucianism, Buddhism,
and Taoism. Let's assume, however, for the sake of psychology, that
we’ve instead walked down a very busy street in present-day Scholarville;
where people of all kinds partake in various interactions. Each strikes
up a different conversation about an aspect of psychology,

Did you know that your academic productivity can
be attributed to your subconscious desire to avoid thinking about your
own possibly imminent death? Publications and other cultural artifacts
are products of a compensatory psychological mechanism for ameliorating
the psychological terror resulting from the awareness of one’s own
mortality. Like cognitive dissonance and other paradigms before it,
Terror Management Theory
is on the verge of becoming the latest mainstream psychological
meta-theory for explaining a wide array of psychological and cultural
phenomena.
Although some evolutionists have claimed that the phenomena cited by TMT
are artifacts of coalitional psychology (e.g., Navarrete, Kurzban,
Fessler, & Kirkpatrick 2004), TMT remains a powerful tool for dissecting
cultural products and events. For example, witness the recent
existential crisis of American celebrity singer Cher. Faced with the
recognition of her impending senescence

The appletree was a riddle to me. It was a
gnarled silhouette in an early dusk, a sport that had escaped from
the domestic orchard downwind. Far from farmland or pasturage, it
stood alone, a single tree in a glen halfway up the mountain slope.
As I looked from below, a bright winter star shone at the top —
Albadaron. In the wind, it was eclipsed momentarily by a withered
apple clinging

Memory works in strange ways. Scientists are
still unsure how it is stored, and even more baffled by the fact
that it seems to change over time. How do events we perceive as
objective reality become muddled fantasy? Why do people forget
something for years, and then suddenly it pops into their minds?
What makes certain neurons fire and not others? Where? When?
Scientists don’t like chaos.

In
reading the pre-publication of David Livingstone Smith’s The Most
Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War, my first
association was to a short story I read in school – Richard Connell’s
“The Most Dangerous Game.” Not knowing if Smith was familiar with this
story, I found the parallels between the theses of these two works quite
striking. Connell tells the story of a big game hunter who falls off his
boat and is rescued by a bored Cossack aristocrat weary with the ease of
the hunt. He devises a more challenging prey
— one which can use reason
and cunning
— human beings. The big game hunter now becomes the hunted,
confronting panic and confusion, and forcing himself to draw on inner
resources never imagined. These archetypal and revelatory stories are
elemental in Smith’s

In the mid-1990s, two women took a pre-feminist approach towards dating
and mating that was surprisingly well-received
—
landing The RulesTM
on the national bestseller list, and into popular American culture. Shamoon and Fein (1995) proclaimed that by following these simple,
albeit oppressive, rules to dating, any woman could bag a mate in due
time. Some of these rules include avoiding the phone in an effort to
play hard to get, and letting the man take the lead.

After such socially
regressive rules, Redefining Seduction, the author-proclaimed
“evolutionary documentary for women,” seems a breath of relief for

My flat looks out over the largest import/export
operation in New Zealand: Ports of Auckland. Responsible for $20 billion
worth of merchandise annually, and pushing 4.6 million tons of products
in 2006, Ports of Auckland symbolizes a small fraction of an
unimaginably vast global market. At night, the emergency lights of port
vehicles flash incessantly, and the whole operation comes to life. I’m
often transfixed with a mixture of awe and disgust at this marvel of
man, this perpetual motion machine of diesel-powered ships and cranes,
straddle carriers and semi trucks, all following a predetermined circuit
with methodical, ant-like efficiency.What’s the point of it all,
I often wonder. What indeed? This endless, Sisyphean toil — is it really
just so I can have my favorite Belgian ale, organic Australian muesli,
and canned tomatoes